Most people’s eyes gloss right over that. (Really, did you read any of that, or just glance at it and acknowledge “yup, that’s a bunch of stuff that means nothing to me…I’ll just skip that and see what he’s got say about it”?) What looks like nonsense to most people turns out to be really rich data, which is simply stored in such a way to render it basically meaningless. Let’s peer inside and see what this means, starting with Virginia.

With Virginia’s history, the first pattern to emerge is that what looks like a long string of numbers is actually broken up into stanzas by semicolons. Here’s the first stanza:

The first four numbers—1999—are the year in which this section of the code passed into law, at least in its present form. (That was accomplished with then-delegate Chip Woodrum’s HB1985, which overhauled Virginia’s FOIA laws.) And the last string of numbers—§ 2.1-342.01—is the section number that this section had at the time. (Title 2.1 was recodified as Title 2.2 in 2000, which is when this was given its present section number.) In the middle, that series of three-digit numbers (485, 518, 703, etc.) refer to the portion of the Acts of the General Assembly for that year that created or amended this section of the code. The Acts of the General Assembly are sort of like a changelog for the code (but not exactly like a changelog!), in which all of the legislation that passed the General Assembly that year is ordered by the section of the state code that it affects; when multiple bills affect the same portion of the code, they are combined. It’s the intermediate step between a bill and the final, amended code. So here we can see that there were ten portions of the 1999 Acts of the General Assembly that affected this section of the code.

With this as a key, one can step through each stanza in the history of this Virginia law and understand how and when it changed, if not what the substance of those changes was.

Presumably it’s written in this manner to save space in the printed volumes, but obviously it no longer makes sense to codify our laws in a manner optimized for printed volumes. We can do better.

I’m developing a parser for the State Decoded for these history sections, so that rather than displaying this cryptic content, instead the material will be provided in plain English. By storing this data atomically, it’ll be possible to generate a listing of all laws that were amended in a given year, all laws amended by a given portion of the Acts of the General Assembly, or find laws similar to a given law based on their shared history of being amended within the same portion of the Acts. I’m optimistic that it’ll be possible to connect many state codes’ history records back to individual pieces of legislation, rather than just the legislature’s changelog, which opens up a potential wealth of information. (This can already be seen on Virginia Decoded for all changes from 2006 onward, such as in the “Amendment Attempts” listing on § 2.2-3705.1.)

Incidentally, Florida has the same sort of exemptions to its open records law, in s. 119.071, and its history section looks like this:

Virginia Lawyer published an article in their February 2000 issue, by the UVA Law School’s Kent C. Olson, providing a fascinating history of the Code of Virginia. “The Path of Virginia Codification” explains how the Code of 1819 gave way to the Code of 1849, which was in turn replaced by the Code of 1887, then the Code of 1919, and finally the Code of 1950. Each new iteration didn’t just reflect changes in the law by intervening General Assembly sessions, but also a gradual rethinking of what a code should look like, how it should be organized, what purpose it should serve, and how it should be assembled.

Looking back, it seems ludicrous that the official collection of state laws would only be updated once a generation. All of the changes made by the biennial meetings of the legislature in the interim needed to be tracked, and a series of slim volumes had to be consulted to determine how the current law varied, if at all, from the last time that they were collected and printed.

The conclusion that I draw after reading this is that it’s time for the concept of printed legal volumes to disappear, at least as the primary venue for the dissemination of the text of the law. In most (all?) states, the printed edition is the canonical edition of the legal code, and everything else is basically for entertainment purposes only. Many states put a disclaimer on their code’s website to that effect. Illinois, for example:

This site contains provisions of the Illinois Compiled Statutes from databases that were created for the use of the members and staff of the Illinois General Assembly. The provisions have NOT been edited for publication, and are NOT in any sense the “official” text of the Illinois Compiled Statutes as enacted into law. The accuracy of any specific provision originating from this site cannot be assured, and you are urged to consult the official documents or contact legal counsel of your choice. This site should not be cited as an official or authoritative source.

One is tempted to conclude that states cannot long occupy this fantasy world, but the crudeness of most state’s websites for their codes support the notion that they may be able to spend many happy years in their world yet.

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